I’m Vasilis Soumakis, a senior software engineer based in Athens, Greece.

Most of my career has been in the JVM ecosystem — Java, Scala, Kotlin — working on backend systems, distributed architecture, and the kind of large codebases where the real challenge is not writing code but understanding what is already there.

That last problem is what this blog is largely about. Code intelligence systems: tools that traverse a call graph, answer structural questions about a codebase, and use language models in a way that produces answers you can actually rely on.

The articles here go alongside that work. Some are self-contained pieces on specific components — chunking strategies, graph-augmented retrieval, orchestration patterns, verification cascades. Others cover the broader engineering tradeoffs involved in building systems that use LLMs without being at their mercy.

Programs are meant to be read by humans and only incidentally for computers to execute. Donald Knuth

If something here is useful to your work, or if you think I got something wrong, I am always happy to hear about it.